One To One; Kerry Kennedy, Author, "Being Catholic Now"

Hello, I'm Cheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York. Welcome to 1 to 1. Each week, we address issues of timely and timeless concern, with newsmakers and the journalists to report on them. Artist, scientist, educators, social scientist, government leaders, politicians, each are 1 to 1. I'm pleased to welcome activist, advocate and writer carry Kennedy to the program. She turns to her faith for her latest book, Being Catholic Now, prominent Americans talk about change in the church and the quest for meaning. It's just been published by Crown Publishers. Thanks for being on the show. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Okay, we will share all things. Your book is a collection of interviews by about I think it's 37 prominent Americans in which they talk about the impact that being

Catholic has had on their lives. What made you decide to write this book and why now? Well, you know, I grew up in a very deeply Catholic family. When I was a child, we woke up every morning and got on our knees and consecrated the day through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to our Lord Jesus, and we prayed before and after every meal. After dinner, we've read the Bible out loud. And before bed, every night, we prayed around my parents' bed. It was a very, I think, quite typical Catholic upbringing in the 1960s. And like so many Catholics my age, I have since that time, variously grown away from the church, been disappointed with some of what the church has said and done, and still been drawn to the church. I have three daughters who I'm raising in the faith. And so I was really caught in this dilemma of trying to resolve my conflicts with the

church, and the deep sense of faith and strength and vision of a more just and peaceful world, which informs so much of my work and my life and my world vision. So I want to resolve that issue, and that's why I wrote the book. So it's a kind of push-pull kind of relationship. Yeah, and I think that's quite typical. What I found in speaking to all these Catholics, and they range from Bill Maher, who's obviously left the church, and is against religion altogether, to Bill O'Reilly on the right, to Nancy Pelosi on the left, very Orthodox Catholics, like Tom Monahan, and more lax Catholics, and then Cardinal McCarrick, and nuns, and priests, etc. And what I found is that every Catholic has an argument with the church. The more Orthodox feel that the church has become too lax and too open and big tent, and the more progressive feel that the church has failed to fulfill the promise of Vatican II. And so I found that part

of being Catholic is arguing with the church and feeling conflicted with it, and that's actually part of our strength. I always think about what Pope Benedict said when he came to New York last year, which is that one of the pillars of Catholicism is the search for the truth. And of course, if you search for the truth, you're going to have an argument with the status quo, and I think that's part of our faith is having that argument. I've worked with, you know, as a journalist, a number of my, I work with a number of colleagues who were, you know, race Catholic, or some of them were actually black and went to Catholic schools. And my experience virtually all of them felt that they had been damaged by the church in some way. You know, they talk about nuns who were mean and the corporal punishment, and they talk about the fear and the guilt that the church instilled in them. And you have some of those in your book, but most of them,

you know, talk about a, that the positives over growth and negatives. Yeah, that's true. You know, one of the questions I asked most of the people I interviewed is what as a child, what was your vision of heaven and health? And this was kind of, it's almost a litmus test, because if, if as a child, people describe hell in very violent, angry, terrifying terms, and have little vision of heaven. That's usually a person who's left the church, because their experience of it as a child was very repressive and angry and full of guilt and scary. And I think that, and then if they could describe heaven in lovely, beautiful terms, that's somebody who's usually stayed with the church. That's really interesting. Has had a positive experience. When I was a kid, I remember going up in airplanes. If I was ever in an airplane, I always was looking behind clouds to see if I could see angels. Because heaven

was such a tangible place for me. It was as real as my school or my church or my home. And a very, very positive, beautiful place in some place where all the people who had died in my family were together and were happy and were with the angels. And I was always looking for them. Now, I know that many of the Kennedy women, especially your mother's generation, but also your grandmother, attended Catholic schools, did you also attend Catholic school? I did when I was a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grades. I went to the convent at the Sacred Heart. Okay. And then when I was in law school, I went to Boston College Law School, which is a Catholic university. Do your children attend Catholic schools? No. My kids go to the local public school in Westchester County in New York. And they go to CCD, which I have variously taught. Now, with CCD times, sorry, CCD is Catholic religious education. It's known as Sunday school.

I see. I see. Did you ever, when you were growing up, and maybe when you were grown, did you, did you ever find that you doubted the church's teachings? Not when I was a child, in law school, not so much in law school, in high school, and college. It's not that I doubted it so much, but that it was no longer that important or central to me. I wasn't praying as much. I wasn't going to church every Sunday. It was not a central part of my life or my doing or my, you know, community of friends. So I grew away from the church for a while. And then when I got married, I started going to church every Sunday. And then when I had kids, of course, that raises a whole other issue of the centrality of the church life. Right. I think a lot of people, once they have, they want to provide a religious education where the children, you know, they may have lapse on what, but then when they have children, they want to provide that

upbringing and then the children can do with what they will, you know. Yeah. One of the great things about interviewing all these people for the book was talking to parents about what they're doing, how they're raising children, especially in the stay in age when children, you know, object often to having to go to church or to be in the religious life. One of the people I interviewed was Anna Quinlan. And she's wonderfully perceptive and articulate about that. And she said that her son was 16 years old when he first announced that he was an atheist. And she looked at her husband and said, right on today. And she said, you know, it's part of our Catholic tradition of trying to not go to math. I remember as a kid saying, I don't want to go to math. And that's getting the car. And I think we all remember those days in the interviews that you did. Were there any sort of things that that we curd over and over again? Well, some of the things are the, as I said,

the main thing that kept coming up was people's argument with the church. The sense of spirituality that people gained from this belief in a loving God and a just God. A commitment to social justice came up a lot. That was, that is, you know, imbued by faith. A sense of piety, a sense of commitment to the greater community. I think one of the things that is central to Catholicism is the concept that your, your relationship with God is not just between you and God. It's between you and your community. So the way you treat others, the way you act in life is a reflection and is a, of your relationship with the Almighty. And so that becomes very, very important. And this, one of the things that also became clear to me is the old adage once a Catholic

always a Catholic really rings true that people, even people who have left the church, are still living their lives in ways that are reflective of those Catholic values. Up the interview, Shane, you talk, you tell me about the Anna Quinlan story about our 16-year-old. What were some of the other stories that you heard from the people you interviewed that that touched you in a profound way? Well, there are so many. One is Gabriel Byrne. This is a great actor, of course. And he talked about being sexually abused when he was in the seminary when he was maybe 16 years old by a priest. And what was really very moving about his description is that he, as an adult, sought out that priest and tracked him down and finally found him. And when he got him on the phone to confront him, he was unable to do so. And he then talked about writing a letter, which was published on the front page at the Irish

Times, the biggest Irish newspaper, forgiving the priest after the priest had died. And he said there was no comment, no one said a word. He said, this is- Nobody anywhere. Nobody anywhere. He said, you know, Gabriel Byrne is one of the biggest stars in Ireland. So when he walks down the street, people recognize him. And he said it was like being in the front of the class and taking off all my clothes and nobody saying anything. So it was very, very, very moving. So many of these- Well, what was that about? I mean, does he have a sense? Do you have a sense of why there was no reaction? Well, this was in the early 1980s. It was before the pedophile scandal broke. And he says that the society was just so repressed about this subject that no one could really talk about it. No one could confront it. They were

embarrassed. They were humiliated. And they were feeling their own pain. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to take a short break. We'll be back with more with Carrie Kennedy and being Catholic now in just a moment. You promised me the world. Is this where you had a mind? Every choice we make has a consequence. Help Earthshare and its members restore balance to the world. Visit earthshare.org and see what you can do. Earthshare, one environment, one simple way to care for it. Welcome back to One to One. I'm Cheryl McCarthy and I'm talking with Carrie Kennedy, author of Being Catholic Now. It's just been published by Crown. For a number of the people you

interview, no matter what their relationship is with the church now, many of them said that what really what they were drawn to were the rituals of the church, the sacraments, the mystery of the church. It seemed to have a great hold on them. And as you mentioned, they were drawn to the sort of the social mission, the social activist mission of the church. Were these powerful things for you as well? Absolutely. You know, Peggy Noonan talks about the smell of the candles in church and how important that was. And several of the actors I spoke to talked about how the church is so similar to being on the stage with those lights and the music and the sound and the change from being on the street and walking into the church. And Doris Kearns, the great historian, historian talked about how what the church meant to the immigrant

community in our country, especially to poor immigrants living in overcrowded conditions and slums and difficulty and walking in and being in a place of silence and a place of beauty and how that sense of spirituality was so important and central to their vision of a better life. For me, I've worked in international human rights for 30 years and I have had the enormous privilege of witnessing people around the world who imbued by their Catholic faith, have created change and stood up to government oppression, faced imprisonment, torture, and death for basic human rights. The mothers of the disappeared from El Salvador in the early 1980s who worked so closely with Archbishop Romero there, the entire solidarity movement and Lekthalensa, whose faith is so

central to his sense of being and how the Catholic church and particularly Pope John Paul II inspired that movement and really helped bring down the wall and stop communism throughout Eastern Europe. And more recently in Liberia which endured a 14 year civil war where only about seven and a half percent of that country is Catholic. The Catholic church kept the Catholic schools open throughout that war even when government schools were closed and all the other schools in the country is closed. And the Catholic church kept the only clinics and hospitals open during that 14 year war. And these are some of the best educated, the brightest people in the country, all of whom had tremendous opportunities to leave and to go to safety in a better life elsewhere but who believed that that was their mission. So that sense of social justice that is very, very central

to Catholicism has been an inspiration to me. As the country sort of first Catholic family, you know, I'm sure the Kennedys have had close relationships with many priests from popes all the way down to parish priest. So how did the, so when the church sex scandal broke, how did that affect, did that have a particularly, particularly difficult impact on you and on the Kennedy family? Well, let me not speak for my entire family because first of all there are about 75 of us. There's a lot of different perspectives but for me it was, it was not a terrible shock because I had heard about it through my friends my whole life, you know. So I wasn't surprised that this was going on. I think that the biggest disappointment was the failure of the bishops

to hold the priests responsible and to hold themselves responsible and that was very, very disappointing. But you know, I learned at a very early age to have tremendous respect for Catholicism but to be skeptical about the hub but of any kind of hierarchy. And so I don't think I was particularly shocked. Let me put it that way. I talked a little bit with the response. I spoke to, and also to the tremendous sense of compassion to those victims who have been so, so deeply heard. One of them I interviewed for the book is called Danny McNeban and he tells an extraordinary story of the impact of this on his life and on his family's life and I really recommend that chapter. I, do you think the church has dealt with it sufficiently at this point in time?

Well, you know, I think that Pope Benedict when he came to the United States spoke about it in almost every interview and interviewed met with many of the victims and I think that that was very important. But I don't think it has been an adequate response because the bishops have still not been held responsible for their actions. And the way that the Catholic Church has set up is not a traditional hierarchy. So it's not that the Pope actually can come down on the bishops themselves in the way that you would in a corporation. And so it's really sort of peer pressure that the bishops have to put on one another and I think that they have not done so adequately. The church continues to reject the idea of allowing priests to marry, of allowing women to be ordained as priests, of condoning the use of birth control or abortion or to force.

The church has supported the death penalty. No, the church is against the death penalty. It's against the death penalty. It's against the death penalty. That's the official policy, okay, all right. I'm wrong on that. But do these positions create any conflict for you? And if so, how do you reconcile these teachings with your own beliefs? Right. Yeah, of course they create conflict. You know, the church on the one hand side you're talking about some of these issues on the other side. They are against the death penalty. They're against the war in Iraq. John Paul the second begged President Bush not to pursue that war. He did it anyway. And they, the official doctrine of the church says that every piece of legislation has to take into account its impact on the poor before its past. And so there's, I love what E.J. Dion said, which is the church, if it's really doing its job, should make us all feel guilty. It should make the left feel

guilty and try and get the left to rethink its position on issues like abortion and stem cell research and end of life issues. And it should make the right feel guilty and question themselves on the death penalty and on social justice. There are social justice issues that the war, etc. And I think that that's absolutely right. We should be challenged by the church and often are. But the thing that surprised me, let me just say in writing this book, is how often I found myself laughing. Oh, really? You know, in virtually every interview when I listened to those tapes, I'm laughing out loud. And so it was great fun to write. You know, for instance, I interviewed Nancy Pelosi and she said that her mother always wanted her to be a nun. And that when she would come home from school, her mother didn't say, did you score a goal or did you get an A, but were you

holy today? And I said, well, did you want to be a nun? She said, no, I want to be a priest. Right. And back several women in the books and that exactly. Yeah, Ston and Brazil also talked about wanting to be a priest. And Susan Sarandon said, you know, I was told very early on that I had an overabundance of original sin. And she also told this wonderful story of being seven years old and her aunt gave her glow in the dark rosary beads. And she didn't know they were glow in the dark. So when she went to bed that night and turned off the lights and got under her covers to say the rosary, they started to glow and she thought, oh my god, I'm going to see a miracle. She was quite shocked by that. One of the questions that you ask everybody that you interviewed was, what would you do if you could be poked for a year? Exactly. What would you do if you could be poked for a year? Well, I think that I would start by going back to, in the wake of Vatican II, or in Vatican II, the church developed a series of social justice initiatives on principles.

And I would go back to those and assure and try to assure that the church lives by those principles and that they work on assuring that governments do so as well. And they're very similar to the universal declaration of human rights. But they're very specific that you have to, for instance, you have to assure that everybody who works for you gets a living wage, not just minimum wage, but a living wage, that you have to support unions so that people can have the right to collect a bargaining. They're very particular how to live as a Catholic in this world. And I think that would be good. And I think that those would address other issues like empowering women within the church and allowing women to have any position that a man couldn't have in the church, etc. For more than 30 years, which is as long as I've been a journalist,

I have been either reading or writing stories about the dwindling number of men who are coming into the priesthood and the dwindling number of women who are becoming nuns. How is this affecting the operation of a church now and what's the church going to be like going forward in your view? Well, it's dramatically affecting the church right now. There are not enough priests to keep up with the number of Catholics who want to go to church, both in the United States and around the world. I have a friend who lives in Idaho and she said a priest comes to their parish only once a month. And that the other three Sundays during that month, a woman gets up on the altar and announces I'm not giving a sermon, I'm commenting on, I'm just giving a commentary. It's pretty much down the line. So I think that communities are trying to grapple with this, but it's an

issue that the church really needs to address. Do you see any possible change in this idea of women becoming priests or is the church holding fast on that? Well, I don't hear any movement about it. And it is actually, I was told by one of the people I interviewed for the book, one of the nuns, that it's sort of against the law of their order to even discuss it. So I think that this is a great deal of putting heads in the sand on this particular issue. But it will have to be addressed. The church cannot survive if it doesn't address the issue. Your book is title being Catholic now. And so I guess my question is, what is it like to be a Catholic now compared to what was like 30 years ago? Is there a difference? I think there is a difference. I think what's

important, what's essential is the same, which is to believe in a loving God, a God who wants a more just world. That we each have a commitment and a duty to work on justice issues. That we need to treat each other with love. And that we need to be on a quest for the truth. And that we look to Jesus Christ as the embodiment of that love and how we should walk on this earth. I think those are the essential truths and those are the things that don't change. But there are changes, of course, you know, when my youngest daughter first went to Catholic religious education known as CCD. She was six years old and she came home and she said, mom, the teacher doesn't know anything. It's terrible. And I said, well, what did she not know? And my daughter said, well, she taught us to say, father, son, and holy ghost. And I said, well, what was the problem? She said,

well, I said, why father? God might be a mother. And why son? Isn't it? Does it matter if Jesus was a son or a daughter? Why don't we say child? And now these are questions that did not occur tonight. 30 years ago, right? But isn't it great that your daughter's asking? Exactly. It's a great question. We're out of time. But I want to thank Kerry Kennedy for joining me. Being Catholic now, prominent Americans talk about change in the church and the quest for meaning has just been published by Crown for the City University of New York and one to one. I'm Cheryl McCarthy. If there are any people you'd like to hear from or topics you'd like us to explore, please let us know. You can write to me at CUNY TV 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 1-0-0-1-6. Are you can go to the

website at CUNY.TV and click on Contact Us. I look forward to hearing from you.